I didn’t think it was unexceptional. I thought it was just low-grade Justinian bushwa and dismissed it from my mind. First I’ve heard that the Guarduan actually took it seriously. 
I’m afraid I don’t know what the reference to the government of Quebec arguing with the anglo provinces is referring to? The scope of minority language rights under s. 23 of the Charter is defined by the courts, not by the provinces.
But to elaborate on my comment: there are three different ways Canadian citizens can be rights-holders under s. 23 of the Charter, and therefore entitled to send their children to minority language education:
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Your language first learned and still understood is either English or French, and that language is the minority language in the province you reside in (s. 23(1)(a) - mother tongue provision);
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You received your primary or secondary education in either English or French in Canada, and that language is the minority language in the province you reside in (s. 23(1)(b) - Canadian education provision);
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One of your children has received at least part of their schooling in English or French and that language is the minority language of the province you reside in (s. 23(2) - family unity provision).
Of these three options, the first one was the most controversial in Quebec at the time of patriation, because it meant that anglo immigrants would have a right to have their children educated in English as soon as they earned Canadian citizenship. That possibility fueled the PQ’s concern that s. 23 would help the anglos to swamp the francophone population.
As a result, when the Trudeau government sent the patriation resolution off to Britain after the 1981 constitutional conference, they added s. 59 to the Constitution Act, 1982:
It’s almost 40 years on, and the legislative assembly and government of Quebec have not authorised the proclamation bringing s. 23(1)(a) into force.
That means that anglo immigrants to Quebec, whose maternal tongue first learnt and still understood is English, do not have the right to have their kids educated in English once they get their Canadian citizenship.
Franco immigrants to the other nine provinces and the territories do have the right to have their kids educated in French once they get their Canadian citizenship.
Leaving aside the wonderful discussion about multiculturalism and details about bilingualism…
Yes, a “Trump” could certainly happen in Canada, if one follows the garrulous and indeed verbose Rex Murphy’s columns in the esteemed National Post.
The poor guy has gone all in on Trump now that he’s in his dotage, and has the followers in the comments section to bolster him along (of course, I’m pretty sure that most of these supporters are actually fake accounts run by actors with suspicious accents, but I digress…)
HIs latest column attempts to turn the tables, as it were, and accuses the Democrats of trying to subvert democracy by (probably) refusing to accept the results of the upcoming election (which will, of course, crown King Trump triumphant). He conveniently overlooks which candidate has actually refused to commit to accepting the results, preferring to look backwards, and upon reading the tea leaves, determined that the Democrats are indeed the bad actors here.
In short; Old Rex has completely lost the plot, but he has plenty of Canadians who love them some Trump, and wish we had some of that authoritarianism here.
I gave up on Rex about a decade ago.
They are not enumerated in the Canada Health Act, but actually, much (not all) of what Emmett Hall proposed has actually been implemented in many provinces: “In fact, his recommendations went further than the Saskatchewan plan, proposing additional publicly funded benefits, such as free dental coverage for schoolchildren and welfare recipients and free prescription glasses and drugs for the needy and elderly. ‘The only thing more expensive than good health care,’ he argued, ‘is no health care’.”
For instance, I believe welfare recipients get dental, drug, and eyeglass coverage, and those 65 and over (in Ontario and I think most provinces) get drug coverage, just as Hall recommended.
Yes, but it’s also a very important document, as it lays out a national health care philosophy and the minimum requirements that provincial plans must meet to qualify for federal health care funding. For instance, it prohibits extra-billing (any form of direct patient co-pay), which if carried to an extreme would completely undermine the public health care system.
Thank you all for the wonderful explanation of bilingualism and multiculturalism in the legal & social context of Canada. Would that political debate proceeded so smoothly elsewhere.
It sounds like @Hypnagogic_Jerk’s perspective is that true pure evenhanded multiculturalism would not elevate any language(s), and therefore legal bilingualism represents formally entrenching failure of that ideal. IMO that’s a fine sentiment for any country to aspire to.
As a practical matter, countries have histories and countries have majority languages and majority cultures. And some have large enough locally concentrated enough minority languages and cultures that represent local majorities where “local” is a big place.
In the USA, Spanish is getting more common all the time pretty much everywhere. But we have no large area comparable to Quebec where Spanish is the default. Puerto Rico is linguistically & culturally similar to Quebec but is a) not a state, and b) were it one, it would be one of 51, not one of 9. The lack of Spanish-first, and more importantly, Spanish-only concentration is the main (honest, non-racist) argument against formalizing Spanish as a protected culture/language.
Multiculturalism in any country is a many-faceted issue. How much assimilation is necessary and good vs. how much is too much? How much hewing to old or foreign ways is good vs. how much is too much? Difficult questions about which no bright-line binding general rule can be made. I’m reminded of a saying:
Being open-minded is good. At least until you open so wide your brain falls out.
Ref this:
That does smell of bad faith. It might not be bad faith depending on how the demographics are moving, fiscal realities, etc. But it sure does raise an eyebrow.
No, I wouldn’t say bad faith. The gov’t of Quebec would probably say they never agreed to the Patriation accord in the first place, so aren’t inclined to give way on that specific issue, which has greater significance for Quebec than does francophone immigration in the anglo provinces.
I’ve been thinking more about @RickJay’s claim that I am the only person to think of multiculturalism as anything else than tolerating cultural differences, and I find it unbelievable. In seriousness, I cannot believe that a man as intelligent as he is, who’s by most measures a political moderate, would never have come across any mention of multiculturalism where it means anything more than tolerance, but rather implies the erasure of the notion of a “national culture”, or at least a downplaying of the need for immigrants to seek to integrate in their new culture (and, conversely, also a downplaying of the duty of governments to help immigrants integrate; failure of integration certainly isn’t failure on only one side). If anything, my definition of multiculturalism is the mainstream one. Even in other anglophone countries like Britain it’s used in this way. In Quebec, most political parties support not multiculturalism but “interculturalism” which, when you look at it, is largely the same thing but with a recognition that Quebec has a common culture and is a French-speaking society. So sort of like multiculturalism, except we don’t want to erase the national culture. So if @RickJay really thinks my definition is out there and he’s never heard anything like it, I wonder how he’s able to have discussions with people from different countries.
However, one way I can interpret @RickJay’s answer is that “multiculturalism” as a concept is ill-defined and is liable to be interpreted in many different ways by different people. As per @Northern_Piper, the word appears in the Canadian constitution, but only with very weak legal effect. Since Canada really beats the drum of multiculturalism, to @RickJay and his friends it just means “tolerance” and “being a good person”. Being in Quebec, where “multiculturalism” is strongly contrasted with “interculturalism” (another ill-defined concept), multiculturalism has a much stronger meaning, and if @RickJay speaks with other Quebecers he’ll find out they largely agree with me. In Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, it’s got yet other slightly different meanings, though probably closer to mine.
But this is an interesting phenomenon, and I think it has relevance to the question of whether populist leaders such as Trump could arise in Canada. I’ve long felt that English Canada is a very conservative society, not in the sense of having modern right-wing ideas but in the sense of being peaceful, prudent and elitist. It values politeness, niceness and inclusion, it’s got a fairly narrow range of acceptable ideas, which tend to flow from the elites down to the people. Or maybe I’m mostly thinking about Ontario, because Western Canada for one has already seen arise quite a few populist movements from the left and the right, but it’s worth noting that 1) Ontario is the cultural engine of Canada and 2) most Canadian posters here live in Ontario or are originally from there, or else they’re anglophone Montrealers. The few exceptions like @Sam_Stone tend to have opinions that depart from the elite consensus in ways that sometimes make them anathema. So the “Canadian” consensus is the Ontario (and anglo or bilingual Montrealer) consensus, and that might be essentially what range of opinion people like @RickJay are exposed to. I mean, I remember @RickJay even calling Ontario premier Doug Ford a “fascist”. He sure is a populist, about as populist as Ontario can get, but he’s nowhere near a fascist or even a Trump. He doesn’t live in the land of alternative facts, for one.
So could populist leaders happen in Canada? The answer is yes, because they have in the past, but if they are to gain power federally, they’d have to convince Ontario and that almost means being part of the elite. It means being a boring neoliberal centrist who pays lip service to social justice issues. The range of allowable opinions is about from Erin O’Toole to Justin Trudeau. On the other hand, I feel that this lack of viewpoint diversity does leave Canada susceptible to populist leaders if Canadians start to doubt the elite consensus, and in this case I feel it could happen very quickly and we almost wouldn’t see it coming.
Well, I was unclear and was obviously exaggerating. I should have better phrased that. Since I have on many occasions scoffed at people who think multiculturalism is a threat to their way of life I clearly don’t think you are literally the only person around who thinks that.
It was “wannabe fascist” and I absolutely stand by that description at the time, which was made before he was elected. Events have forced him to be more moderate. He’s still a yutz but dealing with a pandemic has forced pragmatism on him (and anyway, a provincial politician can only do so much damage.
The fact Ford is a junior grade fascist as compared to the likes of Donald Trump doesn’t mean he isn’t a junior grade fascist.
I think that’s true if you want to be Prime Minister right now. I do not think that is necessarily going to be true in 2021, or 2022, or 2036,
Dictators tend to rise to power in crisis, after all. At such times, the willingness of people to move their Overton windows really increases. It is highly doubtful that the likes of Hitler or Franco could have risen to power in a time of peace and prosperity - which is also true of any number of leftist dictators of course. Fidel Castro would be just a failed baseball pitcher if Cuba in the 1950s had been a reasonably well run democracy.
We can say all we want that Canadians have a limited range of acceptable politicians but that’s because the country runs fine. It’s free, reasonably prosperous, and laws are enforced, so of course people don’t want to careen off the road. People can turn to the populist, however, if they feel the fundamental structure no longer serves them. That’s when the “Vote for me 'cause I alone can fix it” and simple answers start to look most appealing.
I wasn’t able to find anything about it easily. There was a Supreme Court decision earlier this year about access to French education in British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, PEI, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador and NWT also intervened to argue against expanding minority language education rights, but not Quebec as far as I can tell. Though the Quebec Community Groups Network did argue in favour of expanding these rights. Maybe it was a previous court decision, I’m not sure.
Well, if you’re in Ontario and want to ride a motorcycle, you need to wear a helmet if you don’t want to get fined, unless you’re Sikh. You may agree with that, but that means you have different duties, at least depending on which religion you practice.
As I’ve said, that depends on how you define multiculturalism. If it’s just being tolerant of people’s individual cultural practices in their private life, then we, living in liberal democratic countries, are all multiculturalists. You, me, Canada, Quebec, Britain, France. But that’s a fairly useless definition. There’s wide agreement that, for example, Canada values a fairly strict form of multiculturalism where the state should strive to facilitate expression of people’s cultural practices, while France is a republican society where cultural neutrality in the public sphere is valued, with the public sphere being given a wide definition. Other societies fall somewhere in between. We’ll definitely hear about it in the next few weeks, as a challenge against Quebec’s bill 21 which forbids wearing of religious symbols by public employees in positions of authority is being heard in the courts.
In the course of human history this is a pretty rare and transient thing. Nor do Liberal democracies do always wear this tolerance lightly. There are excesses in both directions, and I mentioned residential schools (intolerance in the name of paternalism and progress) and Sharia law (I am no expert on this, but Canadians should fully value the rights of more than half its citizenry and sometimes do).
Quebecois think about culture far more than the Rest of Canada, usually framing it as an existential crisis. I value the language and lifeblood of the Quebec nation within Canada. I value tolerance, peace and good government too. Trump could not happen here now. But could, which is why intolerance - even in the name of progress, populism, politics or priority - is never long absent and we must always be vigilant against it.
You have a right to an interpreter separate from having a lawyer. You have to be able to understand the proceedings to be able to instruct your counsel. If you don’t understand the proceedings, you can get an interpreter.
I think we have three disagreements here:
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I don’t see a turban as a sign of ideology. It can be a religious symbol, it can also be a heritage symbol. It could even be a fashion choice. What do you see as the political ideology common to all people who wear turbans? Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea that one can conclude that everyone who wears a turban does so to express an ideological viewpoint.
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Even if it is a religious symbol, what it says to me, and what I appreciate, is that I live in a country where non-whites, non-Christians, can hold public offices. A Canadian can be a public servant regardless of their personal religious values. I don’t see that as multiculturalism, but rather a protection of the fundamental principle of individual religious freedom, which in my opinion is a fundamental Canadian value (sorry Justin, that sounds like a mainstream national value to me
). Any Canadian can become a public servant, regardless of personal religious beliefs. -
Christianity is different from many other religions: one can be a Christian without wearing any particular garb or displaying any religious symbol. If our definition of “same rights and obligations for all citizens” is that no public official wears a religious symbol/garb, that implicitly favours citizens of Christian beliefs/heritage values, over citizens who are adherents of other religious beliefs. So I don’t see the argument for “no religious garb/symbols” as government neutrality to all citizens: it’s a government policy that favours Christians over non-Christians, in the garb (ha!
) of religious neutrality. If I’m a Christian and I’m told that I can only be a public school teacher if I don’t wear a religious symbol, most Christians find that fairly easy to comply with. I can be a public teacher without interference with my religious beliefs. But if I’m a male Sikh who wears a turban, or a male Jew who wears a kipah, that government requirement forces me to choose between being a public school teacher or exercising my religious beliefs. That to me is not government neutrality and equal obligations/duties for all citizens, if an observant Christian finds it easier to be a public servant than an observant Sikh or Jew.
One final general comment: I don’t personally find it surprising that France takes this approach to religious symbols or garb, given its revolutionary history and its history of anti-clericalism. Revolutionary France had an ideology of uniformity: everyone was expected to support the Republic, to speak French (even if one’s native tongue was minority Breton or Basque), and at some times, to be opposed to the Catholic church. Supporting the Church was seen as suspect, because it was potentially another power source or loyalty, separate from the revolutionary republican government.
Requiring all public officials not to show any religious symbols seems to me to be consistent with that approach, which is just as ideological as the concept that individuals can be both public servants and not be required to give up religious values. We have to recognise that both views have ideological components. Not that there’s anything wrong with people having ideology; just that we have to recognise those ideological aspects to both views.
Are so-called “religious symbols” political/ideological? Or rather identitarian/ethnic? I think that’s a very interesting question, and the answer, of course, is extremely complicated. They can be one, they can be the other, and they can be something else. As you can guess, I have many conflicting ideas about this question, and I don’t feel I could write a SDMB post that would do them justice. But I’d enjoy having a spoken conversation about it if we ever get the chance.
Not Canada, but here is Hungary . The ruling party, Fidesz is violently anti LGBTQ etc. He was caught jumping out of a window to escape from a drug and gay sex orgy.
Not only that but he broke Covid rules by doing so.
So, creepy hypocritical bigots are in power every nation, and trying for the top spot. This guy was the # 2 guy in his party. His party controls the parliament, and is passing anti- gay laws.
It appears you left out a link to whatever happened in Hungary. A quick Google News search found this representative article.
Thank you, I really thought I had included it…
Here is the follow up story:
Interesting, thanks, but I’m not sure what it has to do with Trump-kins in Canada?
Well, he’s not entirely a hypocrite. He does not want gay marriage. He just wants to be able to bang other men indiscriminately at a party. I guess if there is gay marriage, his (gay) spouse would not let him do this.